Introducing something new…

After a too long absence, for which we do apologize–profusely–we’re back. We’d neglected this poor old blog and the rest of the interwebs, in part because we’d been working on various new things, but in equal part, to preserve our creative juju and our sanity. Sometimes distance is both, healthy and productive. We enjoy making stuff more than talking about it, so we took this time to make things we think the industry could benefit from. The first of these was finally just released, bright and shiny and ready for prime time. So without further ado – Jon and I are thrilled to introduce you to our new baby – Listers Webs.

For over a decade we’d taken a one-to-one approach to our business. We enjoyed making deep connections with our clients, digging into every nuance of their market, niches, business practices et al. On the best of days, we were fixers, problem solvers, magicians in those nifty white hats. We felt good when we nailed something. That’s always been our greatest motivator to keep going, paychecks notwithstanding. We’d been doing this a long time, by any standard. A decade and a half spent deconstructing behaviors and motivations of real estate consumers. A decade and a half of intimate conversations with agents, brokers and team leaders. I guess it’s inevitable that after all this time we’d see a pattern emerge. A pattern of strange omissions in the constantly dumped into sea of tech products and services. Problems that are not being solved. Needs that aren’t being addressed.

One such glaring omission is the lack of anything cohesive in seller marketing. Yes, there are plenty of single property site providers, and home value landing page services, and postcard marketing companies et al. But outside of generally slim ‘sell with us’ pages within the overall real estate website, there isn’t a place you can point your prospective seller clients to that’ll give them all the information they’d want in a way that is deliberate, focused, uncluttered. A place where a seller won’t be distracted by content that isn’t relevant for them, content meant for buyers, or renters, or that accidental foodie that stumbles on your blog. There isn’t a ‘brag book’, a synthesis of all things that should help a seller choose you. So you point to your current hottest listing, or your latest testimonial, or those almost anonymous looking ‘find out how much your home is worth’ pages. You run Facebook ads to get clicks to those pages. You follow up. You get another listing in a neighborhood and the cycle continues until that property sells, and on and on.

In essence, each of the listings only serves as a marketing resource to acquire the next listing or two for the short duration of it being for sale and immediately after closing, and then all that work, all that photography, copy, love and care that you put into marketing that property goes into the black hole of irrelevancy. The glowing testimonial you receive upon a successful sale of that property serves to potentially attract new clients while it’s occupying the very top of Zillow or Google or Facebook reviews pages and slowly fades into the shadows under more recent testimonials. In short, these snippets are just that – transactional, transient, and generally too disconnected from each other for a reasonable consumer to draw a cohesive image of you as an expert, as the one right person for the job.

And what if the most interesting listing you had was five years ago? That one property where everything went exactly as you’d imagined. Where every photo told a fantastic story just right. Where the seller’s circumstances or needs were such that you’d shed a few tears at the closing table, together, hugging it out? What if that’s the story that defines how you work with your clients? What if your entire career is full of these gems, but none of those properties are on the market today and none of them were sold recently enough to send out those postcards or run those ads?

We’d spend years asking those questions and looking for a platform, for a solution, for that one place where our agent and broker clients could effectively keep telling their stories, the stories of the homes they’d sold, clients they’d helped, problems they’d solved. Stories that encompass the lifespan of their careers, their passions, their brand. And of course a place, where these agents and brokers could effectively and easily present, market and promote the properties they are entrusted with selling to the discerning buyer. It seemed like such a small thing to ask for, and a needed one. In the end, we did what we should have done years ago.